Benvenuti and Welcome!

Hi everyone, and welcome to my bi-lingual English Italian blog! Here you will find every post written firstly in English and then (badly!) in Italian. I welcome all your suggestions, comments, emails and (above all) your corrections!

sabato 13 settembre 2008

As an English native speaker, I can use my own language without any conscious effort or thought. I know how to construct sentences and string them together so that they sound natural and unobtrusive, with a fluid cadence and harmonious structure. I use my familiarity with my own language to sift intuitively through all the possible ways to say something, choosing the words that sound 'right' and apposite. I rarely give a conscious thought to the process, except when I'm actually writing fiction. I simply sit down at the keyboard or open my mouth, and the words are there.

To achieve this effortless facility with the target language is the holy grail for all foreign-language students, and it's probably the hardest part of language learning. How does one learn to use the foreign language naturally, as a native speaker would? I guess it takes hours and hours of talking and listening to native speakers, hundreds of hours of reading books and newspaper articles.

I contribute to the blog ITALIAN TRANSLATION PRACTICE, and I find it considerably easier to translate into English than from English into Italian. This is because I still don't really know how Italian should sound. I haven't yet internalised the rhythms and cadences of the language, and so I try to shoe-horn the Italian into my familiar English framework, which is akin to trying to cram a square peg into a round hole.

At the moment, given all my errors, I'd be contented to speak, like Deirdré, "un italiano corretto, ma inglesissimo", but in time I'd like to speak/write "un italiano naturale". Do you think it's possible?